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Let's begin ....
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Jane's POV
The world didn't stop spinning when your heart broke. It was a cruel, agonizing realization that hit me as we sprinted through the cold, sterile hospital corridors. The air smelled of sharp bleach, metallic floor wax, and the heavy, choking scent of unadulterated fear.
Our footsteps echoed against the polished white tiles like a series of frantic, disorganized heartbeats. Just minutes ago, the screeching tires of the ambulance had torn through the night, hauling my sister's body away from the wreckage of our lives.
Now, we were left chasing the ghosts of her existence down a hallway that felt entirely too long, under fluorescent lights that were entirely too bright.
When we finally rounded the corner into the surgical wing, the world narrowed down to a single, devastating visual anchor. The bright red "Operating Theatre" light was already illuminated. It glowed like an open, angry wound against the pale wall.
My legs carried me forward on pure survival instinct. I stepped up to the small, thick glass window set into the double doors, pressing my palms flat against the cold frame. I needed to see. I needed to know that she was still breathing, that the transmission we had just witnessed wasn't the final image I would ever have of her.
Inside, through the shifting movements of masked medical staff, the maze of hanging IV bags, and the rhythmic, terrifying beeps of life-support monitors, I caught a glimpse of her face.
My breath trapped itself completely in my throat.
It was bruised, swollen, and completely unrecognizable from the vibrant, unyielding sister I had grown up with. She was so pale she looked almost translucent, swallowed whole by the massive surgical drape and the horrific network of tubes keeping her tethered to the physical world.
She looked incredibly small. Jay was never like this. She was a force of nature, a tempest wrapped in human skin, yet there she lay, looking as fragile as a discarded porcelain doll.
Seeing her like thatābroken, defenceless, and fighting a silent battle for her lifeāmade something snap deep within my soul. The crushing sorrow that had been weighing down my chest for the last hour didn't just fade; it mutated. It twisted into a blinding, suffocating, white-hot rage that flowed straight through my veins like liquid fire.
"Jane..."
A pair of strong arms wrapped securely around my shoulders, pulling me back from the glass. It was Yuri. The moment his familiar warmth hit me, the rigid wall of numbness I had built up completely collapsed. The dam broke
I turned into his chest, my fingers clawing at the fabric of his jacket as I sank toward the floor. He caught me, dropping to his knees with me, holding me against his heart as I began to weep like a helpless, terrified child.
"Why did they hurt her, Yuri?" I sobbed violently, the raw sound tearing its way out of my throat and shattering the heavy silence of the hallway. "Why did they have to hurt her so much? She didn't do anything to deserve this! She was already bleeding... she was already so weak and broken over the phone... and that bastard still placed his heavy boot right on her open wound. He crushed her, Yuri! Why would anyone do that to her?!"
My tears soaked through his shirt as my body shook with great, racking gasps. I was grieving for the sister who was currently hovering on the edge of life and death, but beneath that grief, the fire was growing.
Yuri held me tightly, rocking me slightly as I screamed out my agony into the empty corridor, a helpless witness to the destruction of our family's peace.
But as the initial wave of weeping began to pass, my tears started to dry up. The weakness drained out of me, replaced by a cold, calculating venom. I pulled back slightly from Yuri's chest, staring blankly past his shoulder at the blank wall opposite us. My voice stopped shaking. My heart rate slowed to a dangerous, steady thud.
I swear on my own soul, Vales will suffer a thousand times worse than what he did to my sister, I vowed silently, sealing the bloody oath in the deepest recesses of my mind.
I will hunt down every single hand that touched her. I will personally ensure that he begs for a death he will never receive.
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Yuri's POV
Holding Jane in my arms while she wept so violently absolutely shattered my heart into dust. I had known Jane for what felt like a lifetime, and through every prank, every situation, and every moment of stress, she had always been strong.
She was the gentle, comforting presence who dried everyone else's tears, the anchor who kept mr grounded when my own worlds fell apart.
But right now? She was completely broken. She was sobbing with a primitive, gut-wrenching despair that made her look like a frightened little girl lost in the dark.
My own chest was heavy with a dual weight that felt almost impossible to carry. On one hand, the girl I loved more than life itself was falling apart in my arms, and there was absolutely nothing I could say or do to erase her pain.
On the other hand, Jay, my best friend, the girl who had stood by me through thick and thin, was currently fighting for her very survival on the other side of that operating door. The uncertainty of it all was a suffocating pressure.
When Jane's violent sobbing finally began to taper off, she pulled away slightly and looked up at me.
My breath caught in my throat. A physical, icy shiver ran directly down my spine, freezing the blood in my veins.
The soft, compassionate warmth that usually defined Jane's eyes was completely gone. The beautiful gaze that always brought peace to a room had evaporated into nothingness. In its place was a terrifying, dead, icy glare filled with absolute, unadulterated hatred and a thirst for blood. It was a look of pure, unyielding ruthlessness.
I had only ever seen that specific look once before in my entire lifeāand that was in Jay's eyes when the plan was revealed or when she discussed her mother. It was the look of a predator that had finally decided its prey had lived long enough.
Seeing that exact same expression manifest on Jane's normally gentle face made me truly understand, for the very first time, I understood why people call them Angelo's Little Demon .
Beneath their striking, beautiful exteriors lay a dormant, incredibly lethal darkness. It was a shadow that remained hidden during times of peace, but if you dared to awaken it by crossing a line, it would consume everything in its path.
Vales hadn't just captured Jay; he had coordinates for his own destruction. He had awakened the demon inside the angel, and looking into Jane's eyes, it absolutely terrified me.
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Aries' POV
Today was supposed to be my birthday.
We were supposed to be sitting around the grand dining table at the mansion, complaining about the overly fancy food, laughing at Percy's ridiculous jokes, and blowing out candles. I was supposed to be moving forward with my life.
Instead, I was standing in a hospital hallway that smelled of death, watching my family fall apart at the seams.
There was a massive, heavy secret that I hadn't shared with a single soul in that corridorānot even Jane. At exactly 12:00 a.m., when the clock shifted to mark the beginning of my birthday, my phone had buzzed in the silence of my bedroom. It was a text message from an unknown, heavily encrypted number. I knew the syntax immediately. It was from Jay.
She had wished me a happy birthday.
In that quiet moment, sitting on the edge of my bed, I had swallowed every ounce of my stubborn, foolish pride. I had typed out a message, asking her if we could finally put the past behind us. I asked her if we could give our fractured bond another chance, if we could stop pushing each other away.
To my absolute shock, she had replied. She told me that she was already on her way back. She said she was coming home specifically for her Kuya Ari's birthday, and that she was bringing a special surprise with her to finally sort everything out between us so we could be a real family again.
I closed my eyes, leaning my head back against the hard hospital wall, a bitter, agonizing breath escaping my lips.
I never could have imagined that this was the surprise she meant. I never could have dreamed that she would come back to us in the back of a speeding ambulance, covered in her own blood, fighting a machine just to keep her heart beating.
A savage, monstrous urge began to rise from the depths of my stomach. I looked at the closed double doors of the operating room, my hands curling into fists so tight that my knuckles turned stark white and my fingernails bit into my palms.
I wanted to find the bastard who did this. I wanted to tear him apart limb from limb with my bare hands until there was nothing left of him to bury. I wanted to eliminate every single person who had a hand in hurting my little sister.
Yet, even through the consuming, suffocating anger, my mind was spinning with a profound sense of confusion. Who exactly was this man Vales? Why did he have her trapped in an underground bunker? And most importantly, what did he mean by calling her "Jean"? What kind of hidden, terrifying nightmare had Jaxx and Jay been keeping from the rest of us all this time?
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Percy's POV
I pride myself on being the one who can handle anything. Physical pain? I've been paralyzed and endured the pain which would knock a normal man unconscious and laughed it off. Broken bones? Just a temporary inconvenience. Endless pain ? That's just a typical Tuesday for me.
I can take whatever the world throws at me with a shrug and a smirk because I've always believed that as long as you keep moving forward, nothing can truly break you.
But there is one glaring, absolute exception to that rule: I cannot tolerate seeing my sisters hurt.
Jane and Jay are my absolute heart. They are the anchor to my entire existence, the only reasons I bother trying to be a better person.
Watching Jay's broken body get wheeled past me on a stretcher, seeing her vanish behind those operating doors while hovering between life and death, shattered my heart into millions of jagged, unfixable pieces.
Part of me desperately wanted to crack a joke right now. I wanted to open my mouth and say something incredibly stupid, something ridiculous enough to break the suffocating, heavy atmosphere hanging over the corridor. I wanted to make Jane smile, even if it was just for a fraction of a second. I wanted to stop Ava and Zoe from shaking where they stood against the wall. I wanted to be the shield that protected them from the horror of this reality.
But the words died completely in my throat. Every single time I tried to formulate a sentence, my mind forced me back to the images from that video call. I could still see the dark, damp concrete of that bunker. I could still see the malicious, smug look on Vales' face. And loudest of all, I could still hear Jay's agonizing, desperate cry echoing in my ears when he intentionally hurt her to mock us.
A dark, heavy feeling took root in my chest, squeezing the air out of my lungs. I didn't want to laugh anymore. The playful version of Percy died tonight. I wanted to rip the throat out of the bastard who laid a single finger on my sister. I wanted to make him bleed until the ground beneath his feet was soaked in his regret.
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Angelo's POV
I always loved Jay as if she were my own daughter. From the moment she entered our lives with her sharp wit, her unyielding spirit, and her refusal to back down from anyone, she had carved out a permanent place in my heart.
Looking at the closed, silent doors of the operating room, a suffocating wave of pure, unadulterated guilt washed over me, threatening to pull me under.
I had failed her.
As an elder of this family, as someone who was supposed to be a protector, a guardian, a shield against the darkness of the world, I had let her slip through our fingers. I had allowed her to walk right into a trap that had been waiting for her for nearly two months while we sat in our comfortable mansion, wondering where she was.
I could tolerate her stubbornness. Lord knows she was the most stubborn girl I had ever met. I could tolerate her fierce, completely unyielding attitude when she disagreed with my methods, and I could even tolerate the cold, detached armor she wore to keep people at a distance.
But I absolutely refused to accept the fact that my little sister was currently fighting for her very life on a cold operating table because of some fucking, arrogant piece of trash who thought he could use her as leverage against us.
I leaned heavily against the hospital wall, crossing my arms over my chest as I closed my eyes, sending a silent, lethal promise straight into the abyss of the night.
Vales, pray to whatever god you believe in that you should die before I find you , I thought, my jaw clenching until it ached.
Pray that Jaxx gets to you first. Because if I get my hands on you before anyone else does, you will finally understand exactly why Jay called me a demon. I will bring hell to your doorstep, and I will not stop until your entire world is reduced to ash
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Ion's POV
To be completely honest, I hadn't always been very fond of Jay. When I first encountered her, her icy, completely detached demeanor made it incredibly difficult to find any common ground with her.
She was like a fortress with walls built too high to climb, always keeping her emotions under lock and key, always pushing people away before they could get close enough to see who she really was.
But tonight, as I stood in the heavy, suffocating silence of the hospital hallway, watching her family unravel, the truth became painfully clear to me. The coldness she wore wasn't born out of arrogance or malice.
It was a shield. It was a defensive armor she had constructed to hide a deeply scarred, incredibly fragile heartāa heart that had been broken into pieces by the agonizing pain of betrayal from the one person she had trusted most in this world: Keifer.
Strangely, as the hours ticked by and the red light of the operating room continued to burn, a deep, fiercely protective attachment swelled within my chest.
I looked at Jane weeping in Yuri's arms, and then I looked at the closed doors hiding Jay's broken body. I realized, with absolute certainty, that I viewed both of them as my own younger sisters. They were part of us now.
An unfamiliar, terrifying rage began to take hold of my thoughts. I was entirely ready to tear the world apart to protect them, to burn down any city that harbored their enemies.
Seeing Jay reduced to a medical statistic inside that ICU room only solidified my resolve. Anyone who thinks they can hurt my family and continue to draw breath is severely mistaken. Vales had drawn first blood, but we were going to finish the war.
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Kian's POV
Please, God. Please let her be safe. Just keep Jay alive.
The words repeated in my head like a frantic, desperate mantra, over and over again until they lost all meaning. My hands were trembling violently against my knees as I sat in the hard plastic chair of the corridor, my head bowed, staring at the floor. I couldn't look at the glass window. I couldn't look at Jane. I couldn't look at Kuya.
Take my life instead, I bargained silently with the universe, my chest heaving as I fought to control my breathing. Take our wealth, our status, our family name, every single material thing we own. Strip us of everything we have built. Just don't take my sister away from me. Please.
She was the only anchor keeping both me and Kuya human. She was the one who pulled us back from the edge when the darkness of our line of work threatened to consume us entirely.
She was our conscience, our light, the proof that we were capable of loving something purely and without condition. Without her light, we would completely lose ourselves to the abyss. We would become the monsters everyone already feared we were.
I forced myself to look up at the glowing red operating light, my vision blurring with suppressed tears before my eyes hardened into pure, unforgiving steel.
"Hear me closely," I whispered under my breath, my voice dropping into a register that dripped with pure, venomous menace to the empty air around me. "If her heart stops beating inside that room... if she dies because of what Vale did... I will make it my life's sole, agonizing mission to ensure that Vales, his bloodline, and everyone he has ever associated with experiences a living hell on earth. I will hunt down his friends, his assets, his legacy. They will pay for every single drop of blood she lost tonight, and I will not show a single ounce of mercy."
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Ava & Zoe's POV
Jay wasn't just a friend to us. She wasn't just someone we hung out with or talked to when we were bored. She was a fundamental, irreplaceable part of who we were as individuals.
Our bond wasn't something built on casual conversations or surface-level interests; it had been forged in the fires of shared secrets, mutual pain, and an unspoken understanding of each other that ran deeper than anyone else in the world could ever hope to comprehend.
We knew the girl behind the heavy armor. We knew the fears she tried to hide, the vulnerability she protected so fiercely, and the immense capacity for loyalty she carried in her heart.
Standing side by side in the suffocatingly quiet corridor, staring at the blurred glass window of the operating theatre, our shared grief quickly solidified into a mutual, burning rage that threatened to consume us both.
Seeing our best friendāthe girl who was usually so strong, so invincible, so terrifyingly competentāreduced to a fragile, broken body lying helplessly on a surgical table felt like a physical, crushing strike to our own chests.
We held onto each other's hands, our grips so tight that our fingers turned numb, but neither of us let go. The helpless, bloodied girl Vales had tortured on that video screen wasn't the Jay we knew. He had tried to break her spirit. He had tried to humiliate her and use her as a tool to mock her family.
Our eyes met for a brief second, an identical expression of cold, unyielding determination passing between us. We didn't need to speak to know what the other was thinking.
Vales had made the biggest mistake of his miserable life. He thought he had captured a hostage, but all he had really done was sign his own death warrant. We were going to make sure he paid dearly for every scratch, every bruise, and every ounce of pain he had inflicted on our sister.
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Serina's POV
Four excruciating hours had passed since the medical team had rushed Jay into the operating theatre. Four hours of listening to the agonizing beep of machines from behind the doors. Four hours of watching the clock tick away, each second feeling like a physical blow to my chest.
With every passing minute, my heart shattered a little more. I had always loved Jay as if she was my own daughter. Seeing her in this horrific state, knowing the torture she had endured while we were completely unaware, was an unbearable, living nightmare.
But as the night wore on, what terrified me even more than the medical uncertainty was the chilling, monstrous transformation happening right before my eyes in the waiting room.
The atmosphere had shifted from one of frantic panic to something far more dangerous: a heavy, suffocating silence that felt like the calm before a devastating storm.
I looked around at the men of the family.
I looked at Keifer, sitting completely motionless, his own unhealed injuries forgotten, his face an emotionless mask of pure, focused malice. I looked at Jaxx and her brothers, their expressions completely devoid of any human warmth, replaced by the hollow, terrifying stares of executioners waiting for their cue.
Then, my eyes drifted over to Jane. My breath caught in my throat, and a cold dread settled deep in my stomach. The beautiful, soft, and gentle eyes I had known and loved for monthsāthe eyes that always offered comfort and graceāwere completely gone.
In their place was a boiling, vengeful spirit that looked ready to burn the entire world to ashes without a single shred of remorse.
The innocence of this family had been permanently, irrevocably extinguished tonight. Vales had sought to break them, but instead, he had unchained something truly terrifying.
Suddenly, without warning, the harsh red light above the operating room doors clicked off.
The heavy double doors swung open with a dull swoosh, and the lead surgeon stepped out into the corridor, pulling down his green surgical mask. The entire hallway held its collective breath, the silence stretching so thin it felt as though it might snap.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. We were all suspended in an agonizing limbo, waiting for the words that would either save us or destroy us completely.
"She is stable for now," the doctor announced, his voice thick with exhaustion as he wiped his brow. "The surgeries were highly complex, and she has sustained severe, extensive physical trauma. Her body has been through an immense ordeal, but she is a fighter. We have managed to stabilize her vitals, but we need to keep her under strict, constant observation in the ICU for the next 48 hours to ensure no complications arise. For now, because of the critical nature of her recovery, only two family member are allowed to stay in the room with her at a time."
A collective, shuddering breath echoed through the long corridor as everyone finally let go of the terror they had been holding onto for hours. Jay was alive. She was stable. She hadn't left us.
But as the immediate fear of death lifted from the hospital hallway, a new, heavy atmosphere immediately took its place. The medical crisis was managed, which meant the uncertainty that had paralyzed us was officially over.
The fear was gone, leaving behind only the cold, hard reality of what came next. Jay was safe behind those doors, which meant the shields were down and the restraints were off.
It was time for the hunt to begin. It was time for Vales to start praying for his life, because mercy was a luxury this family no longer possessed.
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Author's Note
Hey everyone! šāØš
First of all, I want to say a massive, heartfelt THANK YOU to each and every one of you for your incredible love, endless support, and the beautiful wishes you leave in the comments! šš„ŗ I am reading all of your sweet notes, and they honestly make my heart swell so much! šš
I also have some absolutely mind-blowing, spectacular news to share with you all... WE HIT 1 MILLION VIEWS!!! šš„³šš„
Standard words cannot even begin to express how incredibly happy, grateful, and completely overwhelmed I am right now! šš
Seeing another one of my books reach the 1 Million milestone feels like an absolute dream come true, and I owe it all to you guys, my amazing, dedicated readers! š„āØ You are the absolute best! š«¶š
Now that Jay is officially stable... are you guys excited for the next chapter?! šš„
Get ready, because the gloves are officially coming off, the hunt has begun, and things are about to get SO BLOODY! šŖš©ø Vales has no idea what's coming for him! š
Let me know your theories in the comments below! šš¬ Who do you think will be the two family member to stay with Jay in the ICU? Or are you ready to see Keifer and Section E tear the world apart to find Vales?